Film Impressions

REVIEW: Qissa

This review contains spoilers. A version that speaks of the queer themes that emerge in the film was featured in the Gaysi blog. We are also running a buzz page for the film.

It is hard not to be effusive about Anup Singh’s Punjabi film, Qissa, a masterful indictment of patriarchy set in partition-ravaged Punjab. Themes of displacement and loss of identity provide texture to a sprawling canvas awash with stunning visuals that are rich in symbolism, from the almost Biblical depiction of the exodus from Pakistan that sets up archetypes of men and women — the stoic Sikh refugee, Umber (Irrfan Khan), and his supportive wife, Meher (Tisca Chopra) who must now rebuild their lives — to the vertiginous shots of bodies that have fallen from great heights, to the conflicted half-smiles of its women that speak such volumes. Dedicated to Singh’s mother, the film is a tribute (even in its own gut-wrenching manner) to the resilience of women who manage to soldier on in the face of great repression. A luminous Chopra is cast in the mould of a pioneer woman in her own right who could be her husband’s equal in every way, but her Meher is slowly deprived of her agency. She becomes an object of abject domesticity, under pressure (as is still typical) to beget a male heir for Umber, given that she has only borne daughters — three cherubic girls lovingly shot in Renaissance frames by the cinematographer, Sebastian Edschmid.

Irrfan Khan & Tisca Chopra in Qissa

ESSAY: Alternative Women of Cinema

This article was first published in Midday, Oct 30.

For the second consecutive year, an Indian entry was adjudged Best Asian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. After last year’s Qissa, Margarita, with a Straw has wowed audiences and jury alike at Toronto, if the constant buzz on Twitter is anything to go by. Lead actor Kalki Koechlin’s performance as Laila, an aspiring writer living with cerebral palsy, is so masterly that when she walked into the post-screening Q&A, statuesque as ever in a Sabyasachi couture outfit, there was reportedly an audible gasp of surprise from many who had simply assumed the role had been played by a real-life wheelchair user. What marks Laila out as different from the winsome (and decidedly straight-laced) creations who have inhabited other ‘Indian woman discovering herself in the west’ narratives like English Vinglish and Queen, is the fact that she is equipped with a full-blown sexuality that refreshingly doesn’t kowtow to her physical impairment. Intriguingly, she chooses both male and female partners, and the film’s two-minute promo perhaps packs in more lesbian adventurism than several decades of Indian film, in which queer women remain woefully underrepresented. Director Shonali Bose has openly spoken about how she has drawn from her own bisexual relationships and her cousin’s journey with cerebral palsy. It would be interesting to see whether Laila’s sexual fluidity is allowed such fervid expression because her own ostracism leads to a rejection of the labels (and behaviors) that ‘able-bodied’ people box themselves into so easily. Margarita, with a Straw brings to mind Waaris Hussein’s Sixth Happiness, a 1997 film which dealt with the equally indiscriminate sexual awakening of a young gay Parsi writer (Firdaus Kanga) afflicted with brittle bones, who also resolutely refused to play the victim.

Koechlin with Revathy in Margarita, With A Straw

ESSAY: Mary Kom, From Book To Screen

AND WHY THIS FILM MATTERS

There is a sense of enormous struggle and emotional charge to Mary Kom's life that Omung Kumar's 'sort of' biopic (it begins with a disclaimer that the film draws from incidents in the boxer's life, suggesting that they've been modified/fictionalised) doesn't bear out. A reading of her autobiography, Unbreakable, confirms this suspicion and yet miraculously, the film still offers us glimpses into her remarkable journey. The signs are there, if only as markers.

REVIEW: Mardaani

SUPER COP

There's something very satisfying about Pradeep Sarkar's Mardaani. Not just that it has a female protagonist but one who is truly empowered and doesn't get compromised by the filmmaker at any point either to make her rise heroically from the ashes as in the Zakhmi Aurat-type revenge melodramas laced with exploitative situations or even to underscore the villain's menace. She isn't run down by her bosses, ridiculed by co-workers or lectured by her husband for being the cause of his suffering or putting family at risk in the pursuit of criminals.

ESSAY: On Ankhon Dekhi and Nebraska

CRAZY OLD FOOLS

There’s a peculiar likeness between Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Bauji (Sanjay Mishra) in Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi. Both are lost souls in a lost world. Woody’s much older, hence easier to dismiss as senile (with a King Lear-esque fuzziness about him). Bauji still works at a crummy travel agency selling foreign tours to strangers over the phone—the distance between the dreams he peddles and his own reality almost as impossible as the meeting of two parallel lines. When the boss asks him where he’s actually travelled, he can only think of Vaishno Devi. This proves to be a little problematic after he takes the drastic decision to stop believing things he hasn’t seen for himself.

ESSAY: 'Queen' And The Birth of A New Heroine

ATTAGIRL!

An early scene in Vikas Bahl’s Queen reminded me of a similar one in Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). A young woman wants to take a journey by herself for the first time and asks her father if he’d let her go. In DDLJ, the London-born and bred Simran (Kajol) must chant prayers and appeal to the patriarch’s emotional side to let her ‘live’ the last month of her life before she’s carted off to Punjab to marry a stranger. “Kya aap meri khushi ke liye, meri apni zindagi se ek mahina bhi nahin de sakte?” she asks. The old man yields with the famous declaration, “Jaa Simran, jee le apni zindagi.”

Implicit in this line is the assumption that marriage is the end of a woman’s life (pun intended).

ESSAY: Fandry And The Question of Social Inclusion

By Y.M.Deosthalee

The UPA Government has been aggressively propagating financial inclusion. They introduced schemes such as NREGA, compelled banks to open branches in remote areas, enforced priority sector norms for credit to underprivileged etc. But has this changed the country's social fabric? Have we forgotten caste, religion, and language-based differentiation? Has the dowry system been abolished? Have we won the war against superstition? Have we brought about real transformation in society?

REVIEW: Gulaab Gang

THESE WOMEN NO CRY

Instead of the regulation item song, the end credits of Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang roll to inspiring stories of women who’ve overcome disadvantages of birth and of patriarchal oppression to find ways to fulfil themselves and help others. It’s a welcome change. Sadly, the founder of the real Gulabi Gang, Sampat Pal doesn’t figure on this list. Her defamation suit against the filmmakers also seems justified since they've obviously drawn on her persona without permission, credit or compensation. Still, she needn’t worry about being cast in an unflattering light in this heavily-Bollywoodised version. Rajjo (Madhuri Dixit) is a hero and worthy successor to Mrityudand’s (1996) Ketki who rallies the womenfolk to take on a bunch of hypocritical men in a fictional Bihar village.

PROFILE: Sachin Khedekar

This article first appeared in Time Out magazine

What kind of work would an actor of Sanjeev Kumar’s enormous talent but modest looks have attracted in contemporary cinema? Surely he couldn’t have played the six-pack flaunting hero of youth-obsessed love stories or a member of the lowbrow comedy club. Today even character parts are caricatures mechanically executed by veterans like Rishi Kapoor, Om Puri and Anupam Kher. Fortunately for Sachin Khedekar, a man of equal gifts, Marathi cinema still offers a small but vital window for creative expression.

REVIEW: Highway

ROAD TO NOWHERE

This review contains spoilers

Dear Papa,

I am writing to you from my new home in the mountains where the air is so fresh, the water so clean, the sheep so adorable and the women in ethnic costumes with cool folk music on their lips so trendy! I now live in a mud house with cute little square windows and have even learnt to make tea on the chulha, sweep the floor and make my own bed. Of course, when it's warmer I sleep on the green grass and gaze at the white stars shining bright in the ink blue sky.

Alia Bhatt in the new film from Imtiaz Ali, Highway